The Daily Signal - #538: How the Sexual Revolution Gave Us Identity Politics

Episode Date: September 4, 2019

"If you ask the question, ‘Who am I?’ — up until the sexual revolution, that was not a hard question to answer," says Mary Eberstadt, author of the new book, "Primal Screams." She joins the podcast to discuss identity politics, the "pre-rational emotional expressionism" present in our political discussions today, and more. We also cover these stories: • Walmart is changing its gun policies. • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he could schedule a vote on gun control legislation if the White House expresses support. • Sen. Ted Cruz and activist Alyssa Milano are planning to have a meeting on gun control, after a series of tweets. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, September 4th. I'm Jared Stetman. And I'm Kate Trinko. Today we feature Daniel Davis's interview with Mary Eberstadt, where the two talk about her new book, The Primal Scream. It's a great interview all about Mary's fascinating insight, that it was really the sexual revolution and the mayhem that followed that helped foment identity politics and create this very fractured culture we're in now. If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review. or five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news.

On Tuesday, Walmart announced that it would end all handgun and short-barreled shotgun ammunition sales. In addition, Walmart will also stop selling handguns entirely and request that customers no longer open-carry guns in their stores. Walmart's CEO, Doug McMillan, said that the decision was prompted by recent shootings. William said in a statement, quote, we encourage our nation's leaders to move forward and strengthen background checks to remove weapons from those who have been determined to pose an imminent danger. Congress and the administration should act.

Given our decades of experience selling firearms, we are also offering to serve as a resource in the national debate on responsible gun sales. Could the GOP-controlled Senate be taking a vote on the gun backgrounds check bill passed by House Democrats in February? In an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said, I said several weeks ago that if the president took a position on a bill so that we knew we would actually be making a law and not just having serial votes, I'd be happy to put it on the floor. And the administration is in the process of studying what they are prepared to support, if anything. And I expect to get an answer to that next week. If the president is in favor of a number of things that he has discussed openly and publicly, and I know that if we pass it, it'll become law, I'll put it on the floor. The battle over Brexit continues in the UK as Parliament will reportedly try to stop the country from leaving the European Union.

A defection by Conservative Party member, Philip Lee, to the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats, has sparked the potential for a general election vote. This would be the third general election vote in four years. Lee said in a letter to pro-Brexit Prime Minister Boris Johnson that divisions over the EU had, quote, sadly transformed this once great party into something more akin to a narrow faction and which, one's conservatism is measured by how recklessly one wants to leave the European Union. Lee continued. Perhaps more disappointingly, it has become infected by the twin diseases of English nationalism and populism. Johnson said to Parliament on Tuesday that he was utterly determined to continue the process of severing ties with the EU.

Liberal actress and activist Alyssa Milano will be having a meeting with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, to talk about gun control. The two had a recent Twitter exchange that began with, Milano tweeting, can someone cite which passage of the Bible God states it is a God-given right to own a gun? And Cruz responding, in part, an excellent cue, worth considering carefully without the snark of Twitter. It is, of course, not the right to a modern-day firearm that is God-given, but rather the right to life and the right to liberty. Essential to that right to life is the right to defend your life and your family, end quote. then Milano tweeted to Cruz she wanted to meet with him and discuss guns and more, saying, I'll be in D.C. next week. We can live stream the meeting so the American people can hear your bullshit firsthand.

Cruz responded, if we can have a civil and positive conversation in the spirit of 1st Peter 4.8, as you suggest, despite our political differences, that might help resolve the discord in our nation. end quote. Now Milano has tweeted she scheduled the meeting. Bipartisanship, here we come. Next up, we'll feature Daniel's interview with Mary Eversat about her new book, The Primal Screen. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the agenda, you will learn what issues heritage scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research. The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at

Heritage that you can watch online, as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. Well, I'm joined now in the studio by Mary Eberstadt. She's author of many essays and books, including her latest work, Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Mary, thanks for being on today. Thanks for having me, Daniel. So, Mary, you write about identity politics. It's something that Americans are coming more into grips with. It's something college students certainly encounter on campus being labeled according to their identity group. And you argue that this didn't come out of nowhere, but it actually came from the sexual revolution.

I want to ask you about that because part of this tribalism is also racial, which doesn't seem like the sexual revolution. But explain for us your argument. How does all of this grouping people by tribes and labels, how does that come from the sexual revolution? You know, when we get used to contemporary punditry, we fall into the idea that this is somehow about warring tribes. And we get used to people on the left, yelling at the people on the right. But if we take a step back, what you really see in identity politics is that it's coming from everywhere. So there are sexual identitarians and racial identitarians and ethno-identitarians. there are people who are identitarians politically, like who identify first and foremost as feminists, for example.

So what I'm trying to do in this book is ask the question, how did it happen that the question, who am I, has become the most pressing and passionate of our time? Because that's true whether you look left or right, up or down to the culture or to politics. There is a mania out there to know who we are. Where is this coming from? And my argument is that the rise of identity politics directly parallels the fallout of the sexual revolution. The founding document of identity politics, everyone agrees. I was published in 1977.

It was the Combahy River Statement. It was published by a collective of African American feminists. 1977, so the first generation affected by the sexual revolution in the sense of having grown up in it is the first generation to say, we can't trust other people to have our backs. We can only trust people with our grievances to have our backs. That's a remarkable change culturally and politically. And I give a lot of other examples in primal screams of the connection between the sexual revolution and the frenzy for identity that we see around us. But that, I think, is its root. And something you talk about in the book is what you call the Great Scattering that resulted from the sexual revolution and how that paved the way for identity politics.

Explain how that played out. So if you look at the trends that have become omnipresent and unremarkable in many cases since the sexual revolution took hold in the 60s, what do you see? You see abortion, a rise in fatherless homes, a shrinking of the family where fewer and fewer people have siblings. and what all of these changes add up to, leaving aside the culture wars, leaving aside moral questions, what they add up to is a deep, arithmetic change. There are simply fewer people to call one's own. There are people growing up now who have, for example, no siblings, no cousins, fewer aunts and uncles, older parents, et cetera, and add to that what's happened on account of abortion, subtracting members of the human community.

So I call this collective phenomenon the great scattering because I think its effect has been to render individual human beings more atomized than they ever were before. And so that alienation, you believe, led people to cling to artificial groups? Exactly. So I think the way these identity groups function is as a kind of surrogate family. What do they provide for people? They provide emotional security.

They provide the knowledge that there are others around you who are like you and have your back. That, in effect, is a kind of surrogate sibling relationship. And I think the reason that people fly to these groups so frantically is that they are not finding their bearings in the way that humanity has traditionally constructed its identity. So if you ask the question, who am I? up until the sexual revolution, that was not a hard question to answer. Most people would have said, I'm a father, I'm a brother, I'm an uncle, I'm a cousin, etc., etc. These are the building blocks of human identity.

They are relational. It's all about who am I related to. But these days, that is a lot harder question to address by reference to the family. So, for example, if you have a stepfather and then your mom moves on and leaves him, behind. Is he still your father? That's an ambiguous question. And just multiply that as I do in the book by marching through the other ways in which our familial relations are a lot more attenuated now. And it's no wonder then that people are clinging to identity politics to answer these fundamental metaphysical questions that human beings always have. Who am I? What's my place in the

world? Where do I belong? You know, some people might counter and say, you know, we've always had political movements that were in some way tethered to some identity group or, you know, some special interest. You know, we've had workers rise up and unionize against the tycoons, you know, during the Industrial Revolution. And there were labels in those movements. How would you distinguish that from what's become today's identity politics? Sure, that's a fair point. And a lot of people tried to dismiss concerns. over identity politics by saying, well, it was ever thus. People always thought their identities

in different groups. But what's different about today, I think, can be seen if we take the example of what's happening on campuses. If we look at the expression of identity politics on campus, you have, for example, in the case of what happened at Middlebury College with Charles Murray and Alison Stanger, you have a situation in which young men are physically assaulting, a 70-year-old man and a middle-aged woman, that is irrationalism on parade. There is something elementally deranged about that way of practicing politics. And we can multiply that by many other examples, too, that show the unbridled irrationalism of the expression of identity politics.

For example, students going to speeches by controversial guests and duct-taping their mouth shut or putting their hands over their ears or otherwise acting out in this way that I find fascinating because it's so infantilized. So the irrationality of identity politics suggests that there is something pre-political about it. There is something so primordial about this way of doing politics that it's very hard to square with liberal. democracy and self-government. By now, it seems as if a significant portion of our politics is being driven by this pre-rational, emotional

expressionism. And that's a problem for us. It's also a new problem for us, because when people identified as members of trade unions, when people identified as civil rights marchers, we didn't have this way of destructive expression. And that I think is very new and very particular to identity politics as we know it. Well, you also write about the rise of modern feminism.

How does that fit into this great scattering that you talk about stemming from the sexual revolution? So I think this is something that's not well understood by the left or the right. The right tends to dismiss feminists and the left tends to embrace them without question, without looking at what has been driving the phenomenon of modern feminism. So today what we see, and I think it was very much literally on parade during the inauguration and the first marches of the quote resistance, what we see is a swaggering feminism. We see a feminism that uses very coarsened language. Just think about the hats that were emblematic of that march.

And it's a very aggressive kind of expression. And what it suggests, I think, is that in the world after the sexual revolution, feminists have banded together in part because they're responding to a real phenomenon, which is that women are indeed more imperiled than, they used to be. They're more imperiled because they have less non-sexual male companionship, because the sexual revolution has emboldened the strong. It has definitely encouraged the predator. We see this very clearly in the hashtag Me Too movement. So what I'm suggesting is that at the root of the feminist identity today is a kind of protective coloration, a way.

of behaving more aggressively in an environment where many women, whether consciously or unconsciously feel cornered and threatened, and where many are right to feel cornered and threatened, but not for the reasons that feminism says, not because of some abstract, free-floating, quote, patriarchy. That's not what's going on here. What's going on is that the sexual revolution has changed the human ecosystem, and under that change, women are particularly more menaced than before. So do you think feminism is actually capable of protecting women in that ecosystem, or do you think the fact that we're in this new ecosystem makes women's flourishing and protection really impossible? Well, this is the terrible paradox, Daniel, and it's a paradox not only for,

feminism, but I think for all of left liberalism, which is because there is not a clear understanding on the part of those people, what's driving the changes in our world. Their solutions are all self-defeating. So, for example, what does feminism say? It says more abortion, more and more abortion, and later and later up until the moment of birth now. Well, abortion, as discussed earlier, is one of the factors that has driven human beings into these isolated, atomized places. And so that's not going to solve the problem, making divorce easier to get, as happened under no-fault divorce, which was another feminist, something else that feminism embraced. That's not going to solve the problem.

That's just making it worse, too. So what has to happen, I think, is a radical reevaluation on the part of feminists and, the left more generally of why it is that we're all at each other's throats these days. What's really going on out there such that a lot of people have the feeling America has come to be a worse place than it was. We need to get the diagnosis right before we can do anything about it. And there, I think, feminism and the left will have an uphill struggle because they have misdiagnosed the problem for so long. Well, you also write that Me Too reveals a breakdown in social learning.

learning is something that's important for us to have. Explain what you mean by social learning and how Me Too reveals that. Well, part of the argument of primal screams is that we forget a fundamental fact about ourselves, which is that we are social animals. Like other social animals, like all mammals and many other animals, we pick up on social cues. And we learn by imitation. And I get into a bunch of research in the book that's germane to this, but the The bottom line is that in the case of hashtag Me Too, we can see that something fundamental

has broken down in relations between the sexes. These for the most part were not the most vulnerable young women in the cases of the exposures in Hollywood and the liberal media. We're talking about women who were coming from privileged positions, college-educated women, sophisticated women who were over and over on the receiving end of all of this male predation. And the point in raising that is not to excoriate the victims. It's far from it. There are victims, and courts of law are making clear that there are victims. But it's rather to say, why were so many women in a supposedly enlightened age in harm's way in the first place?

why was there no self-protection? Why did so few young women seem to have gotten the message? Don't do certain things. Don't go to a boss's hotel room at night, for example. Don't put yourself in a situation where something bad might happen. You know, this is parallel to the argument that you shouldn't walk around in dangerous neighborhoods at night. If you walk around in a dangerous neighborhood at night and something bad happens, it doesn't make you any less a victim.

But it does suggest that the more prudent thing would have been to avoid that situation in the first place. And my question is, why are so many young women in harm's way? Why do these terrible things keep happening to them? And I think it gets back to, again, the fact that many women and many men are not socialized the way humanity has grown accustomed to being socialized. It is to say, without a robust family and extended family, without non-sexual knowledge of the opposite sex, people miss a lot of things about relations between the sexes. And I think that kind of incoherence comes through very strongly in these Rosamon-like stories that emanate from Me Too. So it seems to me a classic example of a breakdown in social learning by a social animal. Well, you're very critical of the sexual revolution as having caused this.

And, you know, some readers might think, you know, Mary, it sounds like you want to undo all of that and go back to the 1950s. Is that really a realistic thing? Is that what you're advocating? Or are you advocating some other path forward that somehow, you know, refutes the sexual revolution but is not exactly the 50s? Well, you know, what amuses me about that is that. is that we have so many cliches for that. We have, don't turn back the clock. You can't put the genie back in the bottle.

You can't go back to 50. Handmaid's tale. Ozzie and Harriet, et cetera. And that proliferation of stereotypes suggests to me that there is a deep desire to avoid this analysis and this subject. And for understandable reasons. I mean, for 60 years, the sexual revolution has been. a great big party, and now we're at the point in the story where it's two in the morning and nobody wants to call the cops. But at the same time, it is only one example of a social phenomenon that seemed as if it's here to stay that could change.

I can give several other ones from the last 50 years alone. Once upon a time, for instance, tobacco smoking was ubiquitous, and there was a deep denial on the part of smokers and corporations. to say that there was anything harmful about this. It took a lot of argumentation and a lot of evidence of the harms of that practice to affect a social turnaround. But it's a social turnaround that nobody, say, in 1960 would have expected when smoking was ubiquitous. So that's one example. Another is that we are social animals again. And what that means is that I think deep down there is a kind of animal sense of self-protectual.

protection. And over the long term, that could rein in some of the more destructive aspects of the revolution. In some ways, I think it already is. There is the argument put forward by Rod Dreher, for example, about the Benedict option. There's a great deal of interest in that among religious people. How can we strengthen our communities so that we are less affected and less buffeted by these kinds of social problems? That's a healthy sign. That's a sign of people want to be. to renorm themselves in a more, in a direction that is better for their self-protection. And I think we will see more of that over time. So I'm not a pessimist about this. I'm not saying roll back the clock and put the women in uniforms and take them out of the paid marketplace. It's not about that at all, but it is about understanding something that the left especially has so far refused to understand, which is what is really underneath.

the more destructive currents of our time. Well, you mentioned some of those cultural efforts to shore up communities like the Benedict option. But what about political means? Does the state have a role in your view to try to shore up what's been lost here? I mean, some would argue that, you know, America itself almost fosters this alienation because we're all so free and democratized. Is that a problem?

Or do you see the state having any role in, in? taking action to kind of fix what's been broken culturally? It's very complicated, isn't it? Because the state, on the one hand, has to bankroll the broken family. The state has to step into fatherless homes in the form of welfare and other benefits. On the other hand, the broken family gives rise to the empowerment of the state. And these two things are very closely bound up together. Yet, there's always room for positive government action, I think.

For one example, we have laws on the books about obscenity. They're simply not enforced. They're not enforced because people feel powerless in the face of the Internet and pornography on the Internet. But people shouldn't feel powerless and the state shouldn't feel powerless. It should feel free to say, when we are faced with harmful products in society, we need to do something about that as cigarettes have been regulated,

as alcohol is regulated. Well, how do we know pornography is harmful? We know it because it is just for instance, often cited as a factor in divorces these days. The state has an interest in lowering the divorce rate because it's more expensive for all citizens when there's more divorce. So that's an example of where we'll, enough determination, I think the state could play a very positive role in turning back

some of the most egregious manifestations of the brokenness that I'm describing. Well, I want to turn this to a slightly personal angle because you mentioned in the book that you're from the Rust Belt, and you see, you know, identity politics stemming from alienation also happening there. And, you know, we often think about identity politics as a campus thing. You know, you've got your LGBTQ alphabet, you know, alphabet soup. You've got a got your racial identities, but in the Rust Belt. Explain how this is taking shape. Well, part of it is the big story that everybody in the mainstream media missed when President Trump was elected.

But his appeal can be seen very clearly if you look at his speeches to working class America. Because one of the first things he did was give voice to the astonishing carnage as the word he used in the word he used. of the opioid crisis. Now, this was something that no establishment politicians made much of at all. The body count from the opioid crisis, and this is only the body count,

this is to say nothing of the disruption of families and communities, is now set at the lowest estimate at 400,000, 400,000 Americans. That's 133-9-11s, right there. And again, the last, left didn't notice it. Why? Because most of these people were white working class people. They were not part of an approved victim community. The establishment didn't notice it. Why? Because the conservative establishment is infused with libertarianism that just assumed everything was going to be okay with more free market, less regulation of drugs.

and this is not what happened. What happened instead was catastrophe. And a catastrophe that was made worse by the family dislocations and communal dislocations that were already in place throughout the Rust Belt. So I think going forward what we need to do as citizens, never mind as liberals or conservatives, is just to have more empathy with one another. And that is something that I think identity politics gets in the way of for everybody because it says essentially there's my group and the rest of you are threats. And we need to get past that.

I mean, we just need to be able to talk as Americans again. Well, and that just gets to my last question. I mean, if you are speaking to a person, maybe a young person who finds themselves prone to identity politics, maybe they have this family dislocation that you talk about and they're looking for meaning in a group. where would you say they should place their identity? We have to get back to thinking of ourselves as Americans. And what I find talking to young people is that their toughness, again, as in the example of feminism, their identitarian toughness and swagger is just there to mask something that is underneath, which is a sense of vulnerability and a sense of wanting to belong.

And though it doesn't work well in a mob situation, one-on-one, all of those people can still be reached because underneath it, what they want is what Hegel said everybody wants. They want recognition. And what they need to learn is that they can find what they want outside of their aggrieved and divisive chosen groups. Well, the book is called Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. Mary Eversad, thanks for your time today.

Thank you, Daniel. Do you have an opinion that you'd like to share? Leave us a voicemail at 202-608-6205 or email us at letters at dailysignal.com. Yours could be featured on the Daily Signal podcast. That'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. Brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce, Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation.

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